Experimental system level analysis of a concurrent dual-band power amplifier for WiMAX and WCDMA applications

This paper presents a feasibility study for the implementation of a concurrent dual-band power amplifier (PA) design suitable for 1.98 GHz WCDMA and 3.42 GHz WiMAX digital systems. The proposed PA design was compared with a test bed based on a pair of dedicated single-frequency band PAs. The dual-band PA exhibited simultaneous peak output power levels of 24 and 17 dBm in the lower and in the higher bands to maintain ACPR and EVM requirements below 33 dBc and 5%, respectively. The conclusions drawn in the paper justify the design effort of this innovative solution, which is capable of increasing the PAE for concurrent dual-band operation maintaining the performance of more conventional solutions.